1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to online advertising systems and methods, and more particularly to systems and methods enabling the acquisition and targeting of online advertising inventory.
2. Description of the State of the Art
The targeting of Internet advertising and content based on the personal attributes of individual Internet users has been a key goal of web publishers and advertisers since the emergence of the Internet as a significant consumer medium. Improved targeting of ads and content provides a more relevant online experience for users and helps to maximize the effectiveness of advertisers' online campaigns.
The degree to which online advertising and content can be targeted is driven in part by the amount of information available to advertisers and web publishers about individual web site visitors. Some of the more common types of information used to target ads and content are: (a) web page context, whereby advertisements are selected and displayed based on their relevance to the context of the web page, such as when an ad for a stock brokerage firm is displayed on the personal finance page of a popular web portal; (b) user-provided information, whereby advertisements and content are selected, or created, and displayed based on information provided by the site visitor during the current or previous site visits such as the terms of his search query, his zip code as entered to obtain local information, or his user registration information, often including age, gender and other personal data; and (c) derived user information, whereby advertisements and content are selected, or created, and displayed based on information derived about a user, without his direct involvement, such as his approximate city of origin, derived using various methods of correlating user Internet Protocol (IP) addresses with approximate geographic locations, or his connection speed.
Existing methods of advertising and content targeting, however, can be limited in scope and accuracy. For example, most sites do not ask users to register, and many of those that do are successful in getting only a small share of users to do so.
Also, popular methods of assessing the geographic location of users based on their IP addresses are limited in accuracy, particularly at the local level. Some existing methods attempt to derive general user location by correlating user IP addresses with registration data from public databases of registered IP addresses and data from various network service companies with equipment broadly dispersed across the Internet. Such methods, however, while reported to be up to 99% accurate in determining users' country of origin, are generally significantly less accurate at the metropolital statistical area (MSA) level and completely ineffective at the zip code level. These methods by their very nature focus on deriving locations of network access nodes rather than end users, which can require quite different approaches. Limitations of such methods are inherent in the nature of Internet Service Provider (ISP) network architectures, where traffic can be consolidated at nodes quite distant from end users and where publicly registered blocks of IP addresses may be allocated by ISPs across broad geographic areas.
While some companies possess potentially valuable profile information for individual Internet users, privacy concerns often restrict their ability to share this information with web publishers and advertisers that might use it to target web advertising or content. In particular, ISPs possess mailing addresses and other information about their subscribers; however, company and industry privacy policies and standards generally prohibit or discourage them from directly sharing such “individually identifiable information” with other companies. ISPs therefore typically use such subscriber data to target ads only on their own content pages.
Meanwhile, most web sites have significant excess ad inventory. Some estimates suggest that over 70% of banner ad inventory goes unsold, generally filled with “house” ads promoting the web publishers' own offerings. Likewise, it has been estimated that only 30-40% of search queries on popular search engines are accompanied by “paid placement” results, in which web links of designated paid advertisers are included with the search results.
Some web publishers choose to sell large allocations of their excess ad inventory to online advertising networks—generally at substantial discounts to their published “rate card” rates—which aggregate inventory from numerous web sites and resell it to advertisers in various cross-network packages. However, this practice is often shunned by the largest of web sites because: (a) the extreme discounting can impact pricing of their premium ad inventory; (b) the allocated inventory can often go unsold or be resold to undesirable advertisers attracted by clearinghouse prices, and/or (c) the advertisements appearing in the provided ad slots are generally untargeted by nature and can thus be perceived as more detrimental to the user experience than can be justified by the additional revenue.
Illustrated in FIG. 1 is a general online advertising network system 100, which typically has an Internet user level 140, a participating web sites level 130, an online ad network provider level 120 and an advertisers level 110. The general online advertising network system 100 typically has the advertisers of the advertiser level 110 providing ad campaigns 111 to the one or more servers 121 of the online ad network provider level 120. The users 141-143 make page requests to, and receive downloads from, one or more servers 131-133 of the participating web sites. Acting on ad tags served by participating web sites, users' browsers then make ad requests to, and receive ads from, the one or more servers 121 of the online ad network provider. General online advertising networks often negotiate blocks of ad inventory from participating web sites in advance, without precise knowledge of, or flexibility to adjust to, immediate demand for that inventory from their advertiser clients. As such, general online advertising networks are often provided with ad inventory that either cannot be filled by quality advertisers or must be sold at significantly discounted prices. As a result, many of the most popular web sites choose not to participate in online advertising networks.
Consequently, there is a need in the art for a method whereby IP addresses of individual current Internet users can be reliably correlated with known attributes of those users and then used to target online advertising across the web, thereby providing a more universal means of online ad targeting. There is a further need in the art for a method whereby an online ad network or third-party ad server can selectively acquire ad inventory from web sites for only those site visitors for whom immediate advertiser demand exists. There is also a further need in the art for a method whereby the immediate demand for ad inventory for specific site visitors can be communicated to web sites by an ad network or third party ad server without explicitly sharing information about those users.